1. FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a display system for a multi-window display, and more particularly to a display method and system which is suitable for interactive document processing and/or image processing.
2. DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIOR ART
Recently, a system which permits an operator to compose and revise a document interactively with a computer, such as a word processor, has been widely used. In such a system, it is desirable from a standpoint of easiness of document processing to display a full page of document information to be processed. However, since a full-page display is expensive, it is usual except for a special case to display only a portion of the document and add a scroll function to select a displaying area. When a complex document containing mixture of Kanji characters and image data is to be processed, the partial displaying system is used due to a limitation imposed by the resolution of the display. In order to display all of the information of the document on screen, a macro data which is an abbreviated version of the original document information, such as a reduced image of the document or a layout chart of the document by a line diagram is needed. In order to display detailed information of the document (a portion of the document) and the whole information (macro data), the display contents on the screen are switched on a time axis or the detailed information and the whole information are separately displayed on a plurality of displays. In the former method, only one of the detailed information and the whole information is displayed at any time point and hence the comparison of the information is difficult. In the latter method, the apparatus is expensive.
When the sentence or text information such as character data combined with image data is processed the following problems are encountered.
(1) Response to text processing such as insertion, deletion and revision of characters is low.
(2) For printed characters inputted from a facsimile, it is difficult to distinguish the image data from the character data to be processed because they are mixedly displayed on the same screen.